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All the Apps That Support Apple's Spatial Audio Feature

Yeah, shame it’s so limited by source.

At home I only really watch YouTube on my iPad. Anything long form I watch on my huge tv so no spatial audio (unless I attempt to sync iPad perfectly with tv, playing two streams, too much hassle).

Use iPad a lot at work in a noisy environment (key worker) but I face the choice of spatial audio with my APP or vastly superior noise cancelling with my Sony XM4’s. Noise cancelling wins out every time.

I have, and love, AirPods Pro Max, but use them strictly in the house. Ill suited to travel in my opinion.

Just wish the new ATV4K supported it. If it comes in a software update (possible or not given location issue - read a good argument it’s entirely possible, simply minus the head tracking which is the feature that I’m interested in the least, impressive thought it is), I’ll buy the new ATV4K IMMEDIATELY!
 
NastyMatt said:
I think SA is amazing, so impressive the way IEM can produce that immersion. I have Beats Pro and my wife has APP - I was mildly jealous when I tried them and heard the effect.

The only downsides are I use Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Sky TV - none of them support it!!
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I'm hoping that WWDC will announce SA support for many more apps, along with SA support with the newest Apple TV.
 
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On tvOS 15 Beta Amazon Prime Video (and probably others) supports Spatial audio.
 
archi penko said:
@jclo Spatial Audio has now been added to AppleTV tvOS 15 hasn't it? In your guide it says Apple TV does not supported it. Time to update?

www.whathifi.com

tvOS 15 for Apple TV is out now, adds spatial audio through AirPods

Complete with dynamic head tracking
www.whathifi.com www.whathifi.com
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Yes including head tracking for apps like Amazon Prime Video.

The guide has been outdated for months.

Watching shows / movies with Spatial audio + head tracking has been a great experience for me.
Great features.
 
I confess to still being a bit confused. This is my use case - I have a vast movie library, that I have ripped from dvds I've purchased over the years, on a NAS box connected to a Mac mini whose display is my TV set. I watch a movie by playing it via VLC (or Apple's semi-abandoned DVDPlayer) and the movie's 5.1 audio is played through my 5.1 speaker setup. I'm sitting on a couch in front of the TV, and (at this point anyway) don't care about any fancy head tracking audio adaptations. All I want out of these headphones is to mimic the 5.1 audio experience so I can watch a movie without disturbing anybody else or having them disturb me. I would have expected macOS to deal with shipping the 5.1 audio to the headphones, but it sounds like the movie player software has to take on that burden. Is that right? Can anybody recommend movie playing software on the Mac that I can use for my circumstance?
 
Mick-Mac said:
I would have expected macOS to deal with shipping the 5.1 audio to the headphones, but it sounds like the movie player software has to take on that burden. Is that right? Can anybody recommend movie playing software on the Mac that I can use for my circumstance?
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I can’t, I checked the app I used when I dropped VLC (IINA) and it downsamples surround to stereo, like I assume VLC does?

I think it’s fair to expect that the OS would support what’s formally supported by Apple. Many of the popular ripping formats over the years didn’t have a strict adherence to any kind of standards. So for Apple to TRY to support everything that was made up by someone who’s goal was just get it to “work” rather than make it interoperable or standards compliant at the OS level would be a herculean task.
 
Thanks for your response. While I agree that there are perhaps many different audio standards out there, I'm really only talking about the mainstream AC3 track present on just about all DVDs. Just because there are potentially many audio formats out there doesn't have to mean you completely abandon ship on supporting any of them. Watching a dvd using these headphones sounds like a totally baseline application for these headphones that ought to be covered.
 
Mick-Mac said:
Thanks for your response. While I agree that there are perhaps many different audio standards out there, I'm really only talking about the mainstream AC3 track present on just about all DVDs. Just because there are potentially many audio formats out there doesn't have to mean you completely abandon ship on supporting any of them. Watching a dvd using these headphones sounds like a totally baseline application for these headphones that ought to be covered.
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AH, so then everything is fine when sending the data externally (as the Mac will just stream AC3 to the external decoder… your video format is supported by QuickTime or no?), but, as that external device doesn’t support spatial audio, what you need is for something that will decode AC3 and, instead of streaming out through HDMI, etc. you want it to send the output to the headphone jack in a way that you get the surround sound offered by spatial audio? BTW, apologies if this sounds really basic, I haven’t looked into this before and I’ve found some interesting information in my search on this topic that intrigues me.

Looking up AC3, it appears that there would have been a licensing situation for Apple prior to 2017 when the last of the patents expired. These days, Apple’s likely focusing on Dolby Atmos… but it seems to me like there should be some kind of bridge between the two, right?

OK, checking further, there ARE open source players for Dolby Atmos:
but one is Android only and the other talks about playing via a JavaScript library, so it’s not in a nice app form like VLC or IINA.

Even if this was available as an app, at this point, I’m assuming that you’d have to convert your AC3’s to Atmos in order to take advantage of the Apple’s support for Atmos in it’s spatial audio feature.

After another quick search, there does appear to be software provided by Dolby that does AC3 to Atmos conversion.

Dolby Atmos Conversion Tool | Dolby Developer

developer.dolby.com developer.dolby.com
But, you’d have to go through providing your information in order to download it. If you download it and give it a try, definitely post back.

I think with what I know now, if I had AC3 tracks, I’d download the converter then see if QuickTime can play the resulting audio with the separation desired. If that works, then I might try re-compressing video (if the video you have is MPEG2, which I know isn’t compatible) and see if they can sync.
 
Wow - sounds like you certainly went above and beyond trying to help me out! Thanks! I'm fuzzy on the licensing issue you speak of - I've been able to use Apple's (now effectively abandoned) DVDPlayer to play these files, so maybe the licensing was already in place. Converting my media library audio tracks to Atmos is going to be a monster task (I have 20TB of DVD files). My DVD ripping didn't involve any transcoding other than decryption, so everything is still in VOB format (the same format as on a regular DVD) which QuickTime won't play. The reason I just kept all the video and audio formats the same was because the compression technology DVDs use is primitive by today's standards so I was going to wait before further compressing everything. I believe HEVC is now the way to go for the video, but I'm unclear about how widespread Atmos is for the audio (given that not much supports it).

Your link also led me to the following:
which does imply macOS has built-in Dolby support. I'm going to research this a little further. Really appreciate your assistance!!
 
Mick-Mac said:
so maybe the licensing was already in place.
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Yes, the licensing was in place but limited to the DVD Player only, more than likely. System level codecs that could be used for editing might have been more than Apple was willing to bear given that they didn’t make a lot from OS sales (and the OS eventually went free).

Mick-Mac said:
My DVD ripping didn't involve any transcoding other than decryption, so everything is still in VOB format (the same format as on a regular DVD) which QuickTime won't play.
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AH! Gotcha and makes total sense. And, I agree with keeping the best quality originals and waiting on the transcoding. Even if it takes up WAY more space, any newer codec is likely to love the fact that it’s working with more bits to transcode from :)

Mick-Mac said:
Your link also led me to the following:
https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/Apple-macOS-Overview?language=en_US which does imply macOS has built-in Dolby support. I'm going to research this a little further. Really appreciate your assistance!!
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Yeah, it could be that waiting until now was excellent in that, once you figure out how to get it done, the result will be able to play via QuickTime using any player that SUPPORTS QuickTime, which is great, to any device that supports Dolby Atmos which is even greater!
 
I took an Acoustics course from Dr Bose in the 70's. One day he told the class about an experiment in which subjects blind listened to different speaker systems and judged them for "realism". The winner was a ring of 12 cheap speakers circled around the subjects' heads playing a 12 channel recording of a live concert. This won out over fewer channels using higher quality speakers. The sound was admittedly inferior from a bandwidth or possibly distortion perspective but the experience of having the sound change when the subjects heads moved made all the difference.
 
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Just downloaded Infuse app on a MacBook Pro M1, went for a trial for 1$/month and i must say, it does support Spatial Audio.
 
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